Christine (Albrecht-Buehler) Friedman

Born in Munich, Germany and raised by a world-renowned cell biologist and physicist, Christine has always lived the world from the inside-out. As her family moved around the world every few years, she obsessively catalogued and explored the tiniest parts of her inner life, be it through a journal she has kept for forty years, her boxes full of hoarded photographs, or her intensely personal drawings and paintings. 

 

Christine’s near-perfect memory haunts her work at every turn. Many of her paintings depict an anxious tension between the romantic clarity of her past, a chaotic present, and her unknowable future. Collage represents a concrete representation of the artist at work as she metabolizes her old memorabilia into new forms, finally tearing up old memories to create new ones.

 

She has also turned the microscope on her physical self. For twenty-five years Christine has suffered severe chronic pain due to sarcoidosis and fibromyalgia, often being forced to change the way she holds a brush, or the medium she works in, due to degenerative hand and shoulder damage. Her paintings are almost topographical, charting the tributaries of pain as they circulate her body in vibrant, dangerous, angry colors.

 

Christine’s work is a diary of a private woman laid open for everybody to read. In that way it does what art does best—shines a light inside so that everyone else can find their own way.